I don't know if it's because I read a lot of ancient nursery rhymes and Beatrix Potter books as a kid — or because nursery rhymes and Beatrix Potter stories tap into deeper truths about the essential nature of humans' relationship with animals — but I do see the creatures who live in my immediate domestic orbit through a semi-comical anthropomorphized lens.
Readers of this column have already been introduced to the extended family of deer who make themselves comfortable 24/7, lounging and eating iris and peony tapas in my backyard, led by their staunch patriarch, the buck we call the Reverend Buell. But our property is also home to an extended cast of characters that includes: Bagel Squirrel, a common gray squirrel nutkin who I found eating an actual bagel up in the branches of a maple tree in the driveway a couple of years ago, holding the bagel between his front paws; a "Watership Down" tribe of not-so-stupid brown bunny rabbits who give me the side eye and a wide berth, and the woodpecker who hammers his beak against the metal downspout on the exterior wall of the sun porch, rattling the inhabitants of the house out of our beds a few times a month, with obvious roguish intention.
Now I am turning my attention to the robins who seem to be up to something, some sort of very long game. Do you remember "Little Robin Redbreast"?
Little Robin Redbreast sat upon a tree,
Up went Pussy-cat, and down went he;
Down came Pussy-cat, and away Robin ran;
Says little Robin Redbreast, "Catch me if you can!"
On Saturday I found half a robin's-egg-blue eggshell lying on the concrete sidewalk beside my parked Honda, a dome of magnificent Tiffany color, directly in front of my front living room windows, presented as if the birds were intentionally making a birth announcement.
The curious and Beatrixian detail about this otherwise not-so-surprising-in-spring discovery is that the robin's eggshell was dropped in exactly the spot where I have always found a robin's eggshell over the course of many decades. I definitely, with some excitement, found half a robin's-egg-blue shell exactly there when I was about 12 and again at least once a decade since, making this perhaps the fifth such baby announcement I have found on the concrete pavement directly opposite my front windows. But there is no tree above this patch of sidewalk! No branches above bearing nests. Hmm. The robins are up to something.
Naturalists and sophisticates hate this sort of human-centered worldview. I'm sure there are readers among you who would insist on an attitude toward the birds and beasts that respects the dignity of the animals and their non-humanity. Werner Herzog has made whole documentaries about why we shouldn't project our humanness on animals (see: "Grizzly Man," 2005). But, anyway, I don't care. I find the Beatrix Potter perspective on life very humorous. Do you remember "The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit"? The one in which a very bad rabbit with "savage whiskers" steals a carrot from a gentle, nice rabbit and is rewarded for his bad behavior by having his whiskers and tail shot off by a hunter who appears, deus ex machina, with a shotgun? I wouldn't characterize that Potter tale as some Disney narrative, or a whitewashing of the profound nature of nature, kill or be killed.
There are days when I wouldn't mind at all if a hunter with a shotgun and tall boots were to suddenly appear as a corrective force in my garden, to chase away the Reverend Buell. (I am bad. I am a Fierce Bad Columnist.)
Our cat, Maui — a.k.a. Mouser, Mau-Mau, or Meowie — is definitely a distant cousin thrice removed of Tom Kitten, the star of Potter's "Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding." By which I mean he's naughty. He's a delinquent. He's a bad boy. And I tell him so many times a day, jocularly: He's a wicked creature who is always finding a way to make criminal mischief, chewing teenagers' AirPods, inching vases off the edges of counters with incremental pushes of his paws, clawing holes in the expensively custom-made bed skirt on my canopy bed. Now, that one — "Roly-Poly Pudding" — is dark!
Remember "Roly-Poly Pudding"? A plump, pale-tailed rat named Samuel Whiskers, who wears a waistcoat, and his rat wife, Anna Maria, who wears an apron, catch ahold of Tom Kitten and roll him in dough, energetically preparing to bake and eat him. Tom Kitten, with terror in his kitten eyes, is rescued by his mother, Tabitha Twitchit, in the nick of time. But: dark, dark, dark. Unbelievably, I owned stuffed-animal versions of the gruesome villains, Samual Whiskers and Anna Maria, when I was little, fully costumed, bought from Marlys Dohanos's Whimsies on Main Street, where I stopped daily, on my rounds, for penny candy. Swedish fish and kitten murder. That's life.
My favorite Beatrix Potter story, actually, was "The Tale of Two Bad Mice," in which Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca smash to smithereens the contents of a gorgeous Edwardian doll's house with miniature fireplace tongs and mouse-size shovel — the tiny plaster baked ham, the tiny plaster lobsters, pears, and oranges — in a fit of rage when they discover they aren't edible. This brilliant story irresistibly combines the allure of the miniature with the allure of mayhem. I think, actually, it is the darkness in Beatrix Potter's stories, the violence just beneath the watercolors and pink noses, that made them so appealing, and funny, to me when I was a kid. That's life! It really is! Beatrix Potter and Werner Herzog have more in common than the sniffing middle-brow might expect. (God, I'm a snob.)
Just this morning, I found a bunker fish — as in, a menhaden with silvery-blue scales, about nine inches in length — lying on the pavement walkway that leads to the locked side door of the narthex of the First Presbyterian Church, where I am working these days as church administrator. How about that! A dead bunker. Just lying there in the spring sunshine, more than a mile from Main Beach, where the bunker have been swirling in schools this week between the bars. The sexton of the church informs me that an osprey has been spotted perched up on the weathervane, high, high, high atop the steeple. The birds and the beasts do get up to jiggery-pokery when we are not looking. The osprey who dropped the bunker was probably wearing a Tyrolean hat.